Saturday, December 16, 2017

If I am sliding uncontrollably down a steep embankment headed for a cliff, I won't look for a ladder. I'll flail and clutch for anything--animal, vegetable, or mineral--to get hold of and arrest the fall.

Saturday, November 11, 2017

Normally, I go on a kind of tangent about militarism and epistemology. This year I'm leaving all poking and sniffing and bloviating around the Veteran-as-signifier, to others. Because the signifier Veteran on Veteran's Day is contrived as a prop to show the sacredness of war. At the very inner core of our national rituals valorizing The Veteran is the love of war.

Wars are carried out by armed organizations, generally understood as the military, though there is a long menu of differing armed organizations engaged in a diversity of forms of war. Those organizations are comprised of humans, mostly male humans, but more and more including a female fraction as well. What does war and the preparation for war do to those people who are in those organizations?

The
first four sentences of Borderline
neatly summarize its theses: ‘War is implicated in masculinity. Masculinity is
implicated in war. Masculinity is implicated in the contempt for and domination
of women. Together, these are implicated in the greatest sins of the church’
(p. 1). The fact that a Christian pacifist penned these lines is unsurprising.
More remarkable is that their author is also a retired Special Forces sergeant
in the United States army whose 24 years of service took him to Vietnam, Guatemala,
El Salvador, Grenada and Somalia with a brief stint on the faculty at West
Point. Stan Goff’s CV explodes the common charge levelled against pacifists that
they are only able to keep their consciences clean by letting others get their
hands dirty with the morally sordid necessities of war. Goff would readily
confess that neither his conscience nor his hands are clean, and this helps to
explain why, after his conversion at age 56, he has come to understand
non-violence to be an inextricable part of what it means to be a disciple of
Jesus.

Goff rejects violence, not because it is ineffective—history is rife with
examples to the contrary—but because it is an idol of the powerful, something
to which Christians have no intrinsic claim. He argues that though masculinity
is a malleable cultural construct, the historically consistent identifiers of
what it means to be a man are the subordination of women and execution of
war—essentially two sides of the same macho coin. Jesus’ question to Simon the
Pharisee, ‘Do you see this woman?’ (Lk. 7:43a) is the leitmotif weaved
throughout the book in order to challenge from several different directions
what Goff considers the myopic male wielding of power over and against women.
The borderline from which this book draws its name is the arbitrary one drawn
between genders, races, classes and nations that historically has been defended
vigorously by means of violence. Goff writes that for the Christian such
boundaries have been abolished through the death of Jesus, who offended so many
precisely because he traversed these barriers. The cross is the only truly
redemptive violence in history, though the powerful often recast their use of
violence in salvific language.

Goff
illustrates in some detail how popular films as well as a selective historical
memory continually underwrite the legitimacy of the American version of the
myth of redemptive violence. It is no coincidence that the American Western
became increasingly popular after World War II, Goff explains. The images of
cowboys gunning down bandits, subduing lawless ‘Indians’, and rescuing helpless
women tied to train tracks served to reinforce the American belief in the
necessity of the armed strong man to keep society safe from villains. The
Western resonates with America’s perception of itself as the sheriff in the
white hat providing peace through force to the helpless in the midst of a
dangerous world. This trope did not fade with the waning of Westerns’
profitability. Movies since 9/11 like Man
on Fire and Zero Dark Thirty
remind viewers that sometimes the only recourse for heroes is to resort to
morally dubious violence like torture in order to right an injustice suffered,
and this is not necessarily a bad thing.

Hollywood
is not the sole propagator of faith in redemptive violence and its corollary,
the male prerogative to wage war. Goff draws his readers’ attention to the fact
that the US Department of Defense has also produced its fair share of
pernicious fiction. To illustrate this point, he juxtaposes the stories of
Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman. In the government’s sanctioned fiction, Lynch
was captured by the Iraqi army in a firefight and then interrogated and
tortured in her hospital bed, before being ‘rescued’ by Special Forces in
another heroic firefight.

The
actual narrative does far less to corroborate America’s confidence in its own
moral rectitude in war. By Lynch’s own account, she was neither interrogated
nor tortured in the nine days she was in the Iraqi hospital. The US army’s
mendacity was compounded by the drama that it orchestrated in staging Lynch’s
rescue. Despite knowledge that enemy soldiers had withdrawn from the hospital,
US forces cut power to the hospital, blew open its doors and handcuffed doctors
and patients. Uncharacteristically, the operation was recorded by the military
and the edited video was released the very next day. Six months later Hollywood
followed suit with its own made-for-TV movie.

Goff
draws attention to the irony that the memory constructed by the US army spin
doctors and media that lapped it up was hardly blemished by being exposed as a
fabrication because the little white lies they fed the public reinforced all
the appropriate hierarchies. Lynch, who was made an honorary male by her
participation in the military and willingness to fight to the death, resumed
her rightful role as damsel in distress at the hands of the sub-human Iraqis.
This set the stage for the heroic rescue by Special Operations, ‘the epitome of
moral American manhood’ (p. 186). The fact that the story of Lynch was seized
upon by both feminists and anti-feminists to advance their own agendas
concerning the fitness of women for combat only serves to underscore Goff’s
claim that we do not see this woman, merely her utility within debates about
gender and violence.

If
Lynch’s ‘rescue’ reinforces the American ideal of women in combat, Pat Tillman
is her masculine counterpart. After 9/11, Tillman opted out of a lucrative
contract in the National Football League to enter the military. This initial
sacrifice and his subsequent service in Afghanistan epitomised the virtuous and
selfless citizen fulfilling his duty to his country. Yet Tillman’s service
would ultimately require giving his life, and he was posthumously promoted to
corporal and awarded a silver star for valour in action against the enemies of
the United States.

The
problem with the military’s account of Tillman’s death is that it was not true,
and people at every level of the army’s chain of command knew it. Tillman was
not killed by the enemy but by ‘friendly fire’ from his comrades. Telling the
public the truth about Tillman’s death was not a prudent public relations move.
This was an exceptionally poor time to be candid for a military that, only a
day earlier, had gone into damage control when its improprieties at Abu Ghraib
were made public. The depth of this deception is revealed by the fact that the
lingering public recollection of Tillman’s death (to the extent that it is
remembered at all) is primarily one of a ‘good American son’ who made the
‘ultimate sacrifice’, with the other aspect of his story erased: a duplicitous
military that blatantly attempted to cover up its own failures. The former
story reinforces the national narrative that the sacrifice required for freedom
is no less than the death of a nation’s children on the altars of just wars
around the globe. The truth casts serious aspersions on this understanding of
citizenship.

Goff
traces the origins of American willingness to make such sacrifices (or at least
finance the sacrifices of others) to the sacralizing of the nation after the Civil
War in which, ‘Manliness was consecrated with a blood sacrifice, and the blood
sacrifice of the nation came to
supersede the blood sacrifice of Jesus. The nation became the new deity’ (p.
169, emphasis original). As a result, he argues, the church offered little
resistance to the de facto ‘outsourcing’ of its moral decision concerning
warfare to the state, understood in Augustinian terms as the ‘providential’
guardian of the ‘common good’. What would be unintelligible, however, to
Augustine and any subsequent just war accounts is the legitimation of total war
for the survival of the state. Goff contends that contemporary wars are
inevitably total wars as evidenced by the fact that they kill more civilians
than soldiers (he defends this claim by citing the BBC’s statement that by the
end of the twentieth century, 75 per cent of war casualties were noncombatants;
p. 112).

What
moral sleight of hand is needed to convince one’s citizens that fighting for
the common good necessitates that three civilians die for every professional
soldier killed in combat? Goff suggests that the American answer to this
question is found in the Lieber Code, ostensibly written to reign in unjust
combat practices during the Civil War. Any limits the document sought to impose
on war were hamstrung by its allowance for their circumvention due to ‘military
necessity’. This exception, vaguely delimited as ‘that which is indispensible
for securing the ends of the war’ (p. 167), could outflank any moral criticism
of questionable practices in war as long as the tactics could be portrayed as
obligatory for winning the war. Goff insightfully observes that the Lieber Code
is the elastic boundary that could be stretched to cover any multitude of
transgressions, so it is unsurprising that it became ‘the loophole through
which Sherman would ravage Southern farms in 1864, and through which twenty-two
thousand Dresden civilians would be firebombed to death in 1944, and through
which fell two atomic bombs on Japanese cities’ (p. 168). The Lieber Code, like
other attempts to write ethical warfare into law, tacitly formalised the belief
that war could be either just or effective but not both.

Borderline
is a substantial argument bolstered by autobiographical, feminist,
philosophical, cultural and theological voices. Critics may charge that in
trying to evaluate the problem of war and gender from a variety of angles, Goff
has failed to treat any of them adequately. Philosophers, anthropologists,
theologians and military personnel, as well as feminists from each of these
disciplines, may find Goff’s analysis of their field to be too selective or
thin an account to be useful. In his humble, self-deprecating style, he would
likely own these criticisms while defending the necessity of each vantage point
to ‘explain why masculinity constructed as domination, in war and in relation
to women, is really just one story … of manliness … [T]his very construction has steered the church away from the story
of the Gospels’ (p. xvi, emphasis original).

Goff’s
unique experiences enable him to narrate this story (often with lurid details
and ‘salty’ language that may make some readers uncomfortable) from a rare
perspective that few civilians could access on their own. It cannot be easily
dismissed as a flaccid, pacifist indulgence in an over-realised eschatology.
Rather than relegate justice to the ‘sweet by and by’, Goff’s account gives
Christians sufficient cause (and the tools with which) to interrogate
contemporary accounts of gender and warfare. Such a thesis casts significant
doubts on the notion that Christians can imbibe the dominant cultural myth that
national exceptionalism is justly defended by violence without compromising
their witness. Even if the reader thinks Goff’s portrayal of the sacralizing of
the state is hyperbole, it is difficult to contend that the American desire for
security and its subsequent faith in its military power to provide that
security by any means necessary does not come precariously close to idolatry.
Goff reminds his readers that what differentiates Christians from the ‘ideal’
citizen is that, ‘We are not called to be powerful.
We are not called to be respectable.
We are not called to be patriotic. We
are not called to be masculine. We
are called to be holy’ (p. 400, emphasis original). If Goff’s account of
Christian calling is true, Jesus’ disciples should be leery of entreating the
protection of the very golden calf we have formed from our own treasure,
because in doing so we may very well be calling down judgement upon ourselves.

Monday, August 28, 2017

Like a
child-king incapacitated from a lifetime of indulgence by bullied servants,
Donald Trump is quickly ripping the Republican Party asunder. His sinister calculations,
aimed by a coterie of crackpot advisers at being America’s own Duce—like the
neocon Bush-clique fantasies of democratizing the oil patch for Yankee capital—has
had its opposite effect. The party he commandeered through a hostile takeover during
last year’s election follies has technically won both houses of the federal
legislature and the executive branch; but contrary to capitalizing on that
newfound power, it is metamorphosing into a political calamity.

Saturday, August 12, 2017

Like 9-11. Levittown. Nagasaki. Kristalnacht. Kennedy Assassination. 2007 Crash. 2003 Iraq Invasion. All these black swans, historical pivot points. Punctuation marks on the narrative that replaces memory as history. Is this gonna end up being a thing now? Charlottesville? Another punctuation mark on our wretched history?

These are fearful times. Donnie has discovered there are nukes in the closet, and he wants to boardgame with them in Korea. And his alter -- Kim Jong Un -- seems to be as possessed by masculine blustering as Agent Orange. Really, y'all. This is for-real pretty scary. And what's motivating the process right now is probative masculinity.

Charlottesville.

Apparently White Nationalists are rampaging through the city, confronting counter-protesters, some peaceful, some provocable, some likely themselves provocateurs. And there have been some knock-down, drag-out fights. The cops -- by all accounts -- find themselves in deeper waters than they've ever experienced, and the city has been declared a state emergency to increase police presence. These reactionary gangs headed straight for confrontations with Black Lives Matter, who rightfully increased their general state of vigilance. One account says the thing began over anger at the upcoming removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Now it has spread over town

Will this happen more and more? I have no way of knowing, of who these people are, how they are organized, whether this is a blip or the beginning of a pattern. I know that probative masculinity traverses the political spectrum plotted from right to left. And boys want to prove their masculinity by fighting. The White Nationalists have hardly been subtle about their desire for war. The seek to be in a state of warfare, because they imagine this is how to get the gaze of approval from their idol -- masculinity. Lefty boys (and a few girls) fighting righty boys (and a few girls) is a win-win for fighty boys. Strike a pose. Having said this, the violent confrontations are picked up and amplified by media, giving an untrue impression about the overall character of the opposition.

I fear the reactions to these provocations nearly as much as I fear the provocations themselves. I pray that they are self-limiting, that we are still sufficient in numbers and moral will to dissolve them, like phagocytes. Because fight boys are drawn to conflict as much out of a desire for masculine esteem as by any real desire to defend. Incredibly narcissistic, yes, but there you have it. That impulse to prove oneself A Man . . . jumps right up in front of boys, from long training, and it is a wee bit Pavlovian.

Woof.

So maybe "Charlottesville" will become the first act in a continuing and progressively more dreadful play. Maybe we've passed some point of no return, and the worst is already in train. Maybe Donald Strangelove will disappear "Charlottesville" inside the mushroom clouds of tactical nuclear weapons.

Or maybe we will look back, in five years or ten, and remember "Charlottesville," the name of a memory with many interpreters, a cultural Rorschach test, freighted with bitter grief. The first act in a longer, sadder story. I pray it is not.

Monday, July 17, 2017

Reading about guns every day, and -- of course -- seeing them on TV and in films as instruments of redemption. The perennially armed cops in the US are already heading to fatal shootings in excess of one thousand before the end of 2017; and there is the development of the Redneck Revolutionary movement -- supposedly antifascist -- in which ostensibly antiracist white people remain rooted in, and celebrate, gun culture. "Racism no - Guns yes" is their mantra apparently.

American culture is Baudrillard on steroids and acid. The simulacra has taken over as we withdraw into our electronic life-support and hallucination dens. We come to believe that what we read and see in audiovisual media is true, in part because we have eschewed real experience as too troublesome or risky. We need a reality check on guns.

I was a gunfighter once. Really, I mean it. I was a member of the Army's "counterterrorist" direct action outfit in Ft. Bragg; and the main skill we developed for what were called "surgical operations" like hostage rescue, etc., was marksmanship and close-quarter (gun) battle (CQB). I worked both as an assaulter -- the guys who enter the room -- and a sniper -- the guys who cover the crisis site from without using precision rifles. We really learned our guns. As an assaulter, it was nothing to spend endless hours and thousands upon thousands of rounds of ammunition from our submachine guns and sidearms to achieve the high levels of accuracy required to enter a closed space with our comrades, hostages, and "bad guys," and to be confident that we could place our shots into a five inch circle in a fraction of a second. This practice took a great deal of time and it cost a great deal of money (not our money, but tax revenues). Way more time and money than most people have, even most people who have guns.

We thought about ammunition a great deal, especially how it passes through targets (terminal ballistics) and ricochets. Because, if you are supposed to be ready to rescue hostages, it kind of defeats the purpose if you shoot the "bad guy" and the bullet passes through him and enters the body of a rescu-ee. This was a special concern for aircraft hijacking scenarios, because everyone is lined up tightly in seats like human sardines. One's shooting sector is a long, linear tube.

We decided to test ammunition, and we spent a week testing it at an "aircraft graveyard" in the Arizona desert. Terminal ballistics were tested using gelatin blocks to simulate human bodies. We made gelatin blocks that were body-sized, gelatin blocks that were super-sized, and even gelatin blocks that were supplemented with ribs from a local butcher. We lined up the blocks in frames on aircraft seats, in frames that were lined up outside, and in frames that were separated by variable distances. And we shot them, again and again, photographing and recording data along the way.

We found that the most common pistol round (and our submachine gun rounds), the 9mm, when fired from various pistols, would pass through around three blocks and seat backs before coming to rest in the fourth gelatin block. Okay, this was not so good. Fortunately then, our own standard sidearms were souped-up M1911 45 calibers, that fired a fatter, slower round than the 9mm; and when we tested the 45s, they only went through one block, one seat back, and partway into the next block. Combining this subsonic round with careful shot placement (in split seconds) might at least minimize collateral damage. Shotguns were better the lighter the load, so the 00 buckshot that was our standard went into a second block, whereas the substitution of #6 or smaller "birdshot" kept the projectiles in the first block unless one was almost at point blank range.

Cops use 9mm ammunition for the most part. Assault rifles as long guns (usually 5.56mm or .223 caliber), and 00 buckshot in their shotguns (they also have "bean bag" loads for "riots"). Gun nuts like assault rifles and 9mm or other hot (supersonic) loads for their sidearms. NRA type gun nuts love to talk about the technics and ballistics; and they fantasize about killing home intruders, rescuing white damsels, fighting bad governments in the woods, and shooting black people, "Mexicans," and-or Muslims. Go to guns shows and shooting events, and they talk about this shit quite openly. Now we have the Redneck Revolutionaries, who may have different fantasy targets, but they are still mostly boys who can't relinquish the fantasy of proving their manhood by shooting "the bad men" (in the fantasies, the targets are mostly men, because killing men is more probative of masculinity than shooting women). Then they are caught in a camera angle from below, sun on their faces, wind blowing their hair, True Heroes.

Because they are fantasists and paranoids, gun nuts are looking for a fight; and the immediate possession of a gun, carrying that is, amplifies this pugnaciousness . . . a lot. The quest for masculinity is fundamentally predicated on (deep, unconscious, sexual) fear, and the possession of a firearm is not merely an antidote to fear; it generates that belligerent "courage" that can only originate from a deep, unconscious fear. So guns don't only make people physically more dangerous; they make people psychologically far more dangerous.

An armed society is not a polite society. An armed society is a dangerously stupid society. I'm not talking about hunters in Canada or Iceland who keep a deer rifle in the closet. I'm talking about the exploding mass of sexually-insecure white males who are carrying their Sig Sauers and Berettas into Walmarts and Krogers and middle schools to pick up their kids. At the most extreme, the Preppers -- Lord, have mercy, who are armed to the teeth even as they've lost their minds.

I've proposed elsewhere that Just War theories lost their raison d'etre with the advent of modern war, in no small part because automatic weapons, cannon fire, and bombs of all sorts cannot distinguish friend from foe, and even were they able to, their impact areas/bursting radii are too large to use these weapons without accepting in advance that they will kill bystanders. And soldiers inevitably kill civilians on purpose; but we'll stay with bystander casualties.

In World War I, 7 million combatants died alongside 6.6 million civilians. Fatality counts exclude the even larger numbers of combatants and civilians who are injured, often in ways that cause permanent suffering and disability. In World War II, some 70 million died, and even excluding the ethnic cleansing campaigns, bystander deaths outnumbered combatant deaths by nearly three to one. Sixty-seven percent of Korean War casualties were civilians, and with Allied operations against the North, North Korea lost fully twenty percent of its total population. Around 2 million Vietnamese civilians were killed during the US invasion and occupation, compared to around half that number in combatants. Four out of every five casualties in Afghanistan since 2001 have been civilians; and two of every three casualties in Iraq since the 2003 invasion have been non-combatants. Drone strikes, which are called "surgical," kill ten non-combatants for every combatant -- if you believe the remote operators can really distinguish such a thing through a flying camera. So there's my point, in brief, about "just" war.

My point about guns is similar, if on a smaller scale. Modern rifled firearms and, at close range, shoguns have been refined toward a telos of ever-increasing efficacy -- and by efficacy, we mean lethality at various ranges. They are designed for the instant destruction of tissue sufficient to cause death.

In 2011, there were around 34,000 fatalities from firearms and around 74,000 non-fatal injuries in the US. We use guns in 67 percent of homicides, 50 percent of suicides, 43 percent of robberies, and 21 percent of aggravated assaults. I myself survived eight conflict areas in the Army without sustaining a gunshot wound, and was finally shot outside a bar in 1991 in Hot Springs, Arkansas. These statistics can be deceiving, because when we compare homicides with suicides, the percentages lie.

We kill ourselves more often than we kill others here, and 60 percent of suicides use firearms. Suicides account for 65 percent of suicide deaths -- in part because the shooting is more accurate, and in part because successful suicides, while the numbers compared to attempts are unknown, have a high correspondence to the method used. Firearms, at above 80 percent as far as we know, are the absolute most successful method. So, all other things being equal, a firearm in the house dramatically increases the odds that it will be used for some confused, sick, broken, humiliated, and-or lonely person to extinguish themselves. In 2013, 41,149 were successful -- men far more than women, because men choose firearms, naturally. By comparison, just over a thousand home invasions were repelled by the threat of a firearm, and actual burglary-homicides in the US are around 100 a year nationwide. Do the math. You are quite a bit more likely to have a suicidal person among family or friends in the house than a lethal burglar.

Or kids. We kill more kids per capita with guns than any country in the world, and around 320 kids are snuffed out each year here in home gun accidents, more than three times the probability of repelling an actual homicidal intruder with a gun. (Not to forget, if your home is intruded upon by a killer -- which is about twice as likely as being killed by lightning -- the best course of action is to leave and call 911. Burglars look for guns, because they have a great resale value.)

All that aside now, however, let's get down to the creepy business of what exactly gunshots do. A contained explosion sends missiles down a barrel at speeds that can go through the average elm tree. When a bullet hits a body, it doesn't simply punch a hole and slice through a tiny column of skin, organ tissue, bone, etc. At high velocity, projectiles have brand new physical properties. Three of the immediate outcomes are in-flight deviation, distortion of the projectile, and cavitation. The projectile begins responding to its environment as soon as it leaves the barrel -- so it might tail-drop ("yaw"), or wobble, or turn. The projectile is distorted by the impact with material (like the flesh and bone of a human being) and loses its sleek, perfect cylindricality. The projectile pushes a shock wave through the air around its flight path which enters the body and tears through the tissues surrounding the bullet path in a millisecond "cavity," leaving behind extensive damage not only along the path, but through tissues distal to the path. That's why entry wounds can be quite small, but exit wounds can look like bomb craters in meat. If it hits the upper arm, for example, it might break the bone without ever touching is, or tear up the brachial artery (fatal), or destroy large amounts of muscle tissue (resulting in shock, future infections, permanent disability). A small caliber, subsonic round like a 22 might leave the gun your three-year-old has found, enter the head of your eight-year-old, then ricochet around inside the skull until all its kinetic energy is gone. In a nanosecond. No do-overs.

All this is true if you've just shot Hannibal Lecter; but it is equally true if you missed old Hannibal and the bullet passed through a sheetrock wall and hit the lawyer Hannibal has tied up in the next room for tonight's dinner. Or you may shoot at that fourteen-year-old heroin-addicted home intruder, miss the bad child, have the bullet strike your stone veneer, ricochet, and end up in the lumbar spine of your niece whose come to visit and sleeps in the spare bedroom. If you fire ten times, maybe you can hit the bad child, too, and punish the kid-burglary by blowing holes in his skull and abdomen. That should make you feel better.

By the way, they don't show this kind of stuff in TV dramas and boyflix.

Even if you are a crack shot at the range where you hang out with your buddies and talk about how you'll "double-tap" the bad guys, when something actually happens that provokes you to draw your weapon (instead of the smart thing to do when there is danger, which is to haul ass out of there . . . but the gun has made you stupid as shit now), another person will not be standing still like a target in good light with a range master to ensure no one is downrange when you fire. You cannot, not under any circumstances, guarantee that you will not miss, that you will not hit a bystander, that you will not overreact. And for that reason, NO ONE should be allowed to carry firearms around with them, because they are already, knowingly or not, accepted that they might shoot someone unintentionally. I include cops in this calculus. Why are cops so brave in other countries that they can walk around unarmed except for a baton, some Mace, and maybe a hand taser?

Anyone who calls oneself a Christian and carries a firearm -- given what I just pointed out about our absolute inability to control outcomes in the employment of firearms -- ought to be ashamed and turn in your credentials. You cannot follow Jesus with a Glock in your belt. I'm sorry. Just not possible.

No matter what cockamamie scenario you construct to justify carrying a gun (not talking about someone hunting) for "protection," you cannot escape the reality of this inability to control what happens when a firearm is used, because you cannot predict the circumstances of its use.

You penises will not fall off when you refuse to carry. And you are far less likely to have that unpredictable instant that saddles you with a lifetime of regret.

Sunday, July 9, 2017

Universities, like many institutions, are, beneath their
orderly veneer, sites of constant low intensity warfare. More so, perhaps,
because they deal in ideas, and human beings are correctively ordered in practical pursuits by the immovable
necessities of particular practices; but ideas are inflected by personal
psychology and a plurality of ideological commitments, neither of which is
anchored by practical necessity. I garden and fish, for example, and if I don’t
use the right soil and amendments or the right bait and technique, I get practical
feedback in the form of failure. But we can cling to many faulty, even bizarre,
ideas for quite some time, especially in universities, because some of these ideas
are never tested except within the framework of other ideas; and in a
pluralistic culture like ours, we have generated multiple frameworks with
premises that are so incommensurable with one another that—in the absence of
any ultimate authority for appeal—no resolution to conflicts is even possible.
And so the low intensity warfare in universities takes the form of sniping
through various media, character assassination, and the mobilization of cliques.

I know two people, whose names and institution I will not
cite, one of whom is engaging in this form of warfare against another over the
subject of military veterans. I’ll call them (androgynously) Pat and Gale. Pat
is a graduate fellow and a veteran, who has organized a group of veterans on campus.
Gale is an Ethics professor, never in the military, who is active in the
opposition to drone warfare and torture. Both claim to be opposed to war, their
pacifism rooted in Christian faith. Pat has had issues with Gale for quite some
time, based on Pat’s belief that non-veterans can never speak of veterans, and
Pat’s further belief that veterans are the only people who can speak with
enough authority on the topics of war and peace to “lead” these public
conversations. Gale disagrees. Recently Pat took one of Gale’s tweets from a
conference on war out of context, and made the claim that Gale was guilty of “cultural
appropriating” veterans.

The Gale tweet: “There is a gnosis of violence going on . .
. The notion that combat vets ‘know’ is not good for vets.”

Context: Gnosticism is an insider term among Christians (like
myself) that applies to a particular heresy which claims that redemption is
achieved by acquiring ever more esoteric (“higher”) forms of “knowledge” which progressively
liberate the divine spark. So what Gale tweeted might be translated as: There
is an idea that being a former combat soldier is the highest form of knowledge
about war; and this mistaken notion is not helpful for the actual human beings
who happen to be military veterans (most of whom, by the way, are not “combat”
vets). What they need is what the rest of us need: jobs, decent housing, health
care, maybe some education and training, and—from my own perspective—some life
skills that help them break a lot of military habits and a dependence on
veteran-esteem.

The tortured argument that Pat published in a university
veteran blog (mobilizing Pat’s clique) can be summarized as “veterans
constitute a culture, a culture that is equivalent to that of, say, African
Americans; and this tweet is an attempt to ‘appropriate’ the ‘voice’ of veterans,
so it is an instance of cultural appropriation.” Which is absurd. I’m sorry, it
just is. And it is a completely uncharitable misreading of what Gale was tweeting about.

But I’ve had this conversation with Pat myself, on more than
one occasion, and it needs a little background. Not the conversation about “cultural
appropriation,” per se, but the one
where veterans are some uniquely oppressed class of people, which Pat claims,
and with which I emphatically—as another veteran—disagree. If anything, what is
being appropriated in all this is the history of genuine oppression by a
uniquely entitled class of people—which we veterans are—and in this case by a
white veteran (Pat is white). Somehow, Pat claims, this tweet is “the standard pacifist justification of credibility
regarding any event about ‘war’ which invites participation by academic[s],’ whose expertise
derives exclusively from having ‘written about’ a subject with which they have
no ‘first hand’ experience.” As in conversations I have had with Pat
myself, for a pacifist, he has never had a good word to say about other
pacifists. Pat’s first hand experience in Iraq was in the Artillery branch, and
we’ll come back to why that is important.

Pat honestly believes that
being a veteran, whatever kind of veteran, who served in a conflict theater, in
whatever capacity, is the distinctive qualification for “leading” (he uses this
term) any discussion of war. In our own conversations, Pat explained to me that
he still missed and admired the camaraderie and shared hardships of military
life; and he has taken a page from Alasdair MacIntyre’s most ill-advised passing
reference to the military as a site of distinctively Aristotelian virtue—the military
as a polis, governed by particular
ideas of honor and integrity. He misses that cohesiveness, and believes that
this is the salvageable kernel of value that can be rescued from the uglier
business of what the American military is actually organized to do. Pat
actually teaches a class called “Virtues of War.” I reminded him during our
conversation about this that this is the experience of many kinds of collective
living, not just the military, but—for example—monastic life, women’s land,
firefighters, communes, earlier societies, and so forth.

This is a little like saying that the only people who are
qualified to speak about capitalism are production line workers, because they
are at that point where the rubber meets the proverbial road. It’s a preposterous
notion on its face, and a bald attempt to humiliate, marginalize, and silence
anyone who questions the somehow-exclusive authority of veterans to speak about
war.

How is the “first hand” experience of an Artillery soldier
the same—apart from the greater institutional culture that prevails prior to
the initiation of hostilities—as that of an infantry soldier or military police
prison guard or an office-bound intelligence analyst or a personnel clerk or a vehicle
mechanic or a hospital worker? Do people seriously believe that there is one
homogenous “first hand” experience of War, even among one set of imperial soldiers
in one theater, apart from General Orders, rank structure, and grotesque
ignorance of the people they occupy and attempt to control? Can the abused wife
of a soldier who has been formed by the (violently misogynistic) culture of the
military speak on war? Can the historian speak on war? When I was in Vietnam as
a nineteen-year-old, drug-addled grunt, was I more qualified to speak about the
causes of the war than some (ick) academic who had studied the history of the
conflict but eschewed participation? What about the people who are occupied, bullied,
wounded, and killed by soldiers? What about the people who make the weapons?
You see how perfectly imperfect this generalization of “the first hand
experience of war” is, when you begin to appreciate how complex and
far-reaching is the phenomenon of war itself.

Are we talking about danger? About the risks of service
giving someone a special claim to authority? If so, then before we list
veterans, we need to list loggers, fisherman, and power line workers who die
with greater frequency than soldiers, even during the last decade and a half of
high-intensity military occupations. Roofers die at the same rate as the
military (even when you include military suicides, which are more common among
non-combatant soldiers and veterans that combatants), and for a lot lower pay.
But we don’t see Roofers Day parades or statues of fallen power line workers, or bridges named after loggers and fishermen. In terms of job-related disability, home health workers
are far worse off than military veterans. And even in the military, there is a
hierarchy of risk. Explosives Ordinance Disposal (EOD) is the best job per
capita for being killed at work, followed by Special Operations, combat medic,
supply truck driver (since Iraq, when our war victims learned to use mechanical
ambushes), infantry, rescue swimmer, and helicopter pilot. Does this mean that EOD
is the best-qualified to speak about war, even if the technician has no clue
about how he or she ended up in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria?

Am I allowed to say, as a veteran, just how full of shit
many veterans are? Or what kinds of scuttlebutt makes its way through military
barracks? Or how many, and often ridiculous, ways the “first hand” experience
of veterans in conflict areas is interpreted by the participants? Or how many
Wrong Beliefs these kids have about what they are doing, why they are doing it,
and who they are doing it to?

At the full-of-shit desk, standing tall at the front of the
line, is PTSD! While there are a few people who suffer from post-traumatic
stress in ways that create debilitating problems in their lives, including
people who are not veterans, you can’t throw a rock nowadays without hitting
some vet who claims the disability (and a bumper crop of shrinks willing to
make the diagnosis for disability claims). It is almost a status symbol, yielding
simultaneous sympathy and admiration for the mentally-wounded “hero,” and . . .
oh, by the way, gives anyone a ready excuse for being a world-class shit. I’m
disrespectful to women . . . PTSD. I beat my kids and spouse . . . PTSD. I’m a
loud-mouth drunk . . . PTSD. I’m a rapist . . . PTSD. I’m a lazy slug . . .
PTSD. I’m a bully . . . PTSD. I committed armed robbery . . . PTSD. You get
sympathy, admiration, and a get-out-of-jail-free card. What’s the downside?

So what connects this posing/malingering by veterans, the
faulty claim that veterans have some exclusive authority to speak about war, the
nostalgia many veterans feel for their days in uniform, and the way veterans get
special recognition, official and unofficial, for their “sacrifices” (the
military is the highest-paying, highest-benefits job available to most
high-school graduates who qualify)?

C’mon, let’s just say it. Militaristic American nationalism.
And veterans, while they do get the shitty end of the stick on some benefits
(like everyone else in neoliberal, downsizing society), get to cash in on the
status and esteem. I wish fishermen and home health workers got the same deal I
have—as a retired army veteran—for health insurance. And why aren’t roofers
held in such high esteem? They don’t kill anyone or destroy property or spread
pain and grief and devastation in their wake. They do work that keeps us dry
and comfortable. I have been made to sit in a docked plane and wait while those
in uniform were allowed to disembark before the other passengers, and once one
jingo jughead started clapping for the kids in uniform, everyone else felt
obliged to join in (when I didn’t, people looked at me like I just came out of
Fido’s ass).

Pat, going back to our story, supports his claim of cultural
appropriation/oppressed class by noting that “veteran” is a federally protected
status, like women in sports or black people who want to vote or gay folk who
want a job. Really? Veterans need special protection? In fact, what this status
is another perquisite that sets aside
jobs and other benefits specifically for veterans. Anyone ever seen a law that
requires that X percent of your contracting work force be lesbians?

This may at first blush seem strange that I am myself
speaking as a veteran—kind of, everything I am saying is equally valid whoever
says it—but I am not saying veterans ought not to speak of war, peace, et al, only that we should be held to
the same standards as everyone else and not be allowed to get away with talking
out of our asses. Our experiences, while always filtered through many personal
and historical lenses, are important. But the question is, How are they
important? My take is, what we say is important, if what we say is true, as
correctives.

One of the reasons veterans are worshipped in this
militaristic culture is the mystique that surrounds the military, and this
mystique includes a boatload of silly misapprehensions created by military
propaganda, official and unofficial, as well as silly macho stories in books,
television, and film. The collective imagination of the military by those who
are not in the military is one of heroic martial sacrifice, while life in the
actual military is—99.9 percent of the time—bureaucratic piddling and checklisting,
day-to-day drudgery, and many eyes on many clocks waiting to get home and pop
that first beer. Speaking of which, American military home-life is often an
orgy of consumerism. Military towns are now oases of wealth accumulation, where
tens of thousands of young people with well-paying, secure jobs make money rain
on restaurants and bars and lenders and toymakers (adult and child) and
entertainers and the builders of cheap new houses.

Veterans benefit from this mystique, and so there is a tacit
understanding to keep mum about how off the mark it really is.

Susan Jeffords once wrote about “the war story,” that story
of the pathos of one or a few people (usually men) that serves as an “ideological
transmission belt” in support of war, by taking the focus off the geopolitical,
the financial, the structural reasons for wars, and forcing us to identify with
the individual “warrior.” This is precisely what is attempted through the
insistence on the veteran as the ultimate authority on war. If correction is
what veterans can offer to any discussion of war, then the corrections cannot
be more war stories unless the goal is to valorize the warrior and the war.

When I say corrections, I mean just that. Correcting errors.
When someone says the US was protecting the South Vietnamese from aggression, I
can say that the grunts in my unit were encouraged to hate the Vietnamese—all of
them—and to seek any excuse we could find to kill as many of them as we could.
I can say that when I spoke with other grunts from other units, they said the
same thing. When someone calls a battalion a squad, or treats such terms as
interchangeable, or calls all soldiers officers, or doesn’t know the difference
between Special Operations and Special Forces, etc., then I can offer
corrections. In Pat’s case, Pat wrote an article (as a former artillery
soldier) describing snipers as people who kill from several kilometers away, making
them like artillerymen, I can offer a correction. I was a sniper for a time,
and even the trainer for 2nd Battalion, 7th Special
Forces’ sniper. Snipers generally shoot at ranges under 800 meters, more often
half that, and they see what they shoot (one person), unlike artillery which
shoots across the horizon with shells that have bursting radii that can kill
many unseen people. You see how
easily even a veteran can write about combat experience and say things that are
mistaken.

Is there such a thing as military culture? I suppose there is,
but it also consists of many subcultures. The overall culture is expressed in
the language and norms (legal, policy, custom). In Basic Training or Boot Camp,
everyone learns how to tell time by a 24-hour clock, express distance using the
metric system, know the rank system, follow drill commands, comply with customs
and courtesies, basic marksmanship, and so on. After that, people are trained
as one form of specialist or another, with further subdivision among
specialties by rank. But there is also an unofficial culture, one that is
oriented by woman-hating machismo, careerism, and a love of violence. Hey, most
young men don’t join the Army or Marines thinking, “Gosh oh gee, I want to
serve my nation.” Most, when you talk with them, say either “I need money for
school” or “I wanna kill people and blow shit up.”

If there is an official virtue that is reinforced in
practice in the military, it is authoritarianism coupled with unquestioning
obedience. Ethically, the military is absolutely consequentialist. Mission
accomplishment is supreme, and all other factors are subordinated to it. You
know what? Gangs and organized crime syndicates have camaraderie and
cohesiveness, too. Sometimes, we just have to leave the comfort of what we know.
Veterans are not superior in any sense
to non-veterans. We are simply veterans; and if we have certain practical
concerns in common (VA benefits, e.g.)
or certain social concerns in common (the opposition to war), we can join
together. Veterans For Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War have done that
(though many in those organizations still cling to the “special” status of being
veterans, instead of simply serving as corrective witnesses.

Elevating the “voices of veterans” (Jeffords’ “war stories”)
and claiming special authority for “veterans” is a fundamentally reactionary
endeavor; and it will, unchecked, lead one (Pat?) to eventually embrace a
reactionary position on the subject of war (and the abandonment of any
semblance of pacifism). Because there is a contradiction at the heart of this
relation between universally valorizing the soldier/veteran and opposing war.
The veteran-as-hero, as well as the veteran-as-victim, and the
veteran-as-gnostic-knower, all fall on the side of military nationalism. The
veteran is most well-served, as is anyone, when served as the particular and whole person he or she is, not as a “protected”
or hyper-valorized category. Because the category itself is too general to be useful
except in the service of nationalism
and war.

Friday, May 12, 2017

Richard
Dawkins is among those who propose something called universal Darwinism, which purports first of all that mathematically
demonstrable scientific discovery constitutes an ultimate truth claim; that is,
it can explain everything. Everything. Universal
Darwinists, however, violate their own stated principle by jumping to the
non-mathematically-demonstrable conclusion that both nature and society can be
explained using nothing but their “Darwinist” triad, i.e., adaptation (evolution) through variation,
selection of the “fit,” and retention
(through heredity).[1]
They have taken an overly general account of natural selection and attempted a
further generalization of that account to everything else: economics,
psychology, anthropology, and linguistics. Linguistics, for our discussion,
falls within the scope of semiotics—the
study of signs—and we will show why universal
Darwinism is inadequate to the task of understanding any of these things.

The linguistics—or study of language—of
the universal Darwinists, whose
obsessive motivating purpose seems to be proving a negative—that there is no
God[2]—is called, unsurprisingly,
“evolutionary linguistics.” In evolutionary linguistics, the basic assumption
is that a word or phrase, for example, is selected in the same way that nature
selects for long necks on giraffes, through a process of variation (different
lengths of neck), selection of the “fit” (longer necks get more food and live
longer to reproduce more); and retention (the trait is stored genetically and
passed on through reproduction of the “fit”).[3]

What is assumed in this worldview is a
clockwork materialism, or the
assumption of the material as an account of all
being, including human culture. This is an aspect of the dualism we discussed
earlier. The subject is unreliable, but the object contains the only
discernable truth, discoverable
through strict observation that is disciplined with mathematics. The Austrian
philosopher Rudolf Steiner (1865—1925) explained how this was an attempt to
break being into time and space
(instead of time-space), separate them and making space the dominant partner.

The
concept of matter arose only because of a very misguided concept of time. The
general belief is that the world would evaporate into a mere apparition without
being if we did not anchor the totality of fleeting events in a permanent,
immutable reality that endures in time while its various individual
configurations change. But time is not a container within which changes occur.
Time does not exist before things or outside of them. It is the tangible
expression of the fact that events—because of their specific nature—form
sequential interrelationships.[4]

For Darwin, as well as Newton, whose
mechanical ideas Darwin adopted, and for Dawkins with his posse of God-phobic
materialists, the separation of time and space, and time’s subordination to
space (materiality that “holds still” for observation), were necessary to
reduce all reality to a sequence of simple, mechanical causes-and-effects, what
Aristotle called “efficient causation.”[5] The other three types of
causation (see footnote) made them dizzy. The reduction of all phenomena to
efficient causes is an attempt at control
(an obsession most often associated with anxiety). If time is not a thing but
an expression of shifting relations, then it, too, is wild. It needs to be
domesticated by the material, locked into plots on a map. French philosopher
Henri Bergson (1859–1941), who analyzed the phenomenon of cinema, compared this
attempt by materialists, to domesticate time, to films—which, though they
appear to flow continuously, can be broken down into frames where all that
disorienting motion can be frozen into the apparent three dimensions of space—height, width, depth—an illusion
cast on a two-dimensional surface.

Such
is the contrivance of the cinematograph. And such is also that of our
knowledge. Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we
place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially.
We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality . . . We may therefore
sum up . . . that the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical
kind.[6]

This materialist
notion of language, then, not only cannot account for Taussig’s Bolivian
peasant-miners baptizing money, it cannot account for the immense complexity of
a simple conversation between two Western metropolitan persons about a novel
they both read. What is required is an expansive
and inclusive, not a reductive and
exclusive, approach to language that allows for context. When Ludwig
Wittgenstein (1889—1951) formulated his ideas about language, which he compared
to games, he pointed out that language can mean “giving orders, and obeying
them, describing the appearance of an object, or giving its measurements, constructing
an object from a description (a drawing), reporting an event, speculating about
an event, forming and testing a hypothesis, presenting the results of an
experiment in tables and diagrams, making up a story; and reading it, play-acting,
singing, guessing riddles, making a joke or telling it, solving a problem in
practical arithmetic, translating from one language into another, asking,
thinking, cursing, greeting, and praying.”[7]

The universal
Darwinists, in trying to break everything in the universe down to its
evolutionary utility, evade these
problems by claiming that they simply haven’t yet identified the whole train of
cause-and-effect. In other words, their theory is correct even though it hasn’t
yet been scientifically demonstrated to be so, because it is correct. Then they
castigate faith as a form of unfounded belief without the least sense of irony.

More to the point, when they speak of
evolution as if it were reducible to their vary-adapt-retain
triad, they fail to have noticed that human beings—with language in
particular—have evolved to be “biologically determined not to be biologically determined”;[8] in other words, we are by our very nature “constructed” by culture, which cannot, as the dualists
would have it, be separated from nature any more than time can be separated
from matter and space, nor can our semiosphere be deconstructed within the
adapted framework of Newtonian (mechanical) physics.

Wittgenstein’s
theory of language games can be instructive on several accounts when applied to
semiotic discussion. Indeed, any interaction with signs, production of signs,
or attribution of meaning owes its existence to its status as a move in a
language game—that is, a conceptual architecture, a grammar, that we must
uncover. . . Consider
the Augustinian definition of the sign: something put in the place of something
else (to which it is imperative to add: in a relation of meaning or
representation). Wittgenstein tells us that of the elements that make up the
semiotic relation (sign, modes of representation or signifying, the sign’s
referent, etc.), none exists outside a language game. In an interpretive act,
nothing is “intrinsically” a sign: the grammar of the language game is what
makes it possible to identify the sign, its way of being a sign and what it is
a sign of.[9]

Charles
Pierce (1839-1914), the semiotician, developed a classification system for
signs—any signal that refers to something and is received by an interpreter. Human
signs, he said, signify three kinds of phenomena: facts, qualities, and conventions. I point to a can of paint
and I say, “I want that paint.” The term “paint” signifies the actual existing
thing called paint, a fact. When I
browse through the swatch booklet for various paint colors, and I find the one
I want in a paint, I point to the swatch, and say, “I want this one.” In this
case, the sign—the swatch—is not paint, but a way to specify one quality of the paint, its color. When
Harriet Tubman wrote, “Mrs. Stowe’s pen hasn’t begun to paint what slavery is,” she wasn’t referring to paint or the
quality of paint, but to a more complex social issue, using certain speech conventions, like irony and metaphor. Or
in another case, we read an oral thermometer at 101 degrees Fahrenheit, and
that sign—by convention—tells us
someone has a fever, a fact. These
categories—fact, quality, convention—are what Peirce called sign “elements.”

These elements
then appoint classifications to
signs. These classifications he called index,
icon, and symbol. Index signs refer
to natural things. Icon refers to
representative things. Symbol relies
on a socially shared understanding. An actual face is indexical. A portrait photo is iconic.
A yellow happy-face emoticon is symbolic.
And we can see that these categories, from index through icon to symbol become
ever more abstract. Peirce called this “firstness,” “secondness” and
“thirdness.”

The
first is that whose being is simply in itself, not referring to anything or
lying beyond anything. The second is that which is what it is owing to
something to which it is second. The third is that which is what it is owing to
things between which it mediates and which it brings into relation to each
other.[10]

[2] There is a truism in logic that
says, “You cannot prove a negative”; but this is not absolutely true. The
exceptions are “proof of impossibility” (2 plus 2 cannot equal 5) and “evidence
of absence” (There is no coffee in that cup). In this case, however, the claim
“There is no God,” falls outside of either exception, because God—at least as
understood from the perspective of Christian philosophers like Aquinas—is prior
to and transcendent of the Being within which we, as Being’s time-space-matter
captives, establish these kinds of evidentiary proofs.

[5] Aristotle defined four types of
causation: material, formal, efficient, and final. Material causation was what
made up something—this book is made of paper and ink. Formal causation is how
something is formed—a daisy is a daisy and not a rose because of their specific
and differentiated forms. Efficient
causation is a sequence leading to a phenomenon—billiard ball moves, hits
another billiard ball, energy is transferred, second ball moves. Final
causation is a purpose or goal, what an action is aimed at—I am writing now for
the purpose of “causing” a post.

Saturday, April 29, 2017

The recent defeats of Bernie Sanders in the United States
and Jean-Luc Mélenchon in France, as well as the ongoing neoliberal resistance
to the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom have led many of the
left’s guardedly hopeful into premature despair. Elections are like sporting
events. When the clock stops, whoever is ahead wins. But politics is not a
sport, and our tendency to think of it that way has blinded many to the
tectonic shift represented by this abrupt—in political time—emergence of a
strong social democratic pole in the bourgeois democracies after being
ratcheted to the right for decades via the formerly hegemonic Washington
Consensus.

Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Woe to those who
add house to house and join field to field, until there is no more room, so
that you have to live alone in the midst of the land!

-Isaiah 5:8

Production, Consumption,
and Space

If
you could go back in time to the mid-sixteenth century and land in what is now
Eastern Virginia, you would encounter six tribes of indigenous people who
collectively belonged to a political and trade network called the Powhaton
Confederacy. They used beads and tobacco as forms of currency in some trade,
but no one depended upon either for their livelihood. By and large, they lived
through a combination of subsistence farming, hunting, and gathering. They also
did some very limited mining of copper for bead-making and tools. Subsistence
farms grew corn, beans, and squash as staple crops, supplemented by fruits,
nuts, fish, and game gathered from the local environment. Houses were generally
one room, constructed of saplings, leather, and bark. As with many other
subsistence cultures, production and consumption overwhelmingly happened in the
same place.

Compare this to our own lives, where
we consume what has been produced from all over the world, where
general-purpose money has made this possible, and where our dependence upon
money is nearly absolute. One of the
mental tricks played by this space-separation between production and consumption is concealment of relations that are out of sight and out of mind.

Helga Weisz, head of
Transdisciplinary Research for the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research
and Professor of Ecology at Humboldt University in Berlin, uses the metaphor of
metabolism to track flows and nodes. She does so in the context of world systems theory, an acknowledgement that we live in an economy that includes many
nation-states, or an interstate economy.
In biology, metabolism means “the processes by which a living organism uses
food to obtain energy and build tissue and disposes of waste material.”[1] In social studies,
metabolism means paying attention to inputs and outputs, or flows and nodes.
World systems analysis looks at those flows, those inputs and outputs, across
the world. Weisz:

World-systems
theory regards the expansion of the industrial capitalist system as
intrinsically connected to a spatial separation, on a global scale, between the
early and the later stages of the industrial production process, and between
production and consumption in general . . . lead[ing] to a globally uneven
distribution of the costs and benefits of the use of material and energy . . .
I argue that an integration of social metabolism and input-output analyses
provides a conceptually sound approach to account for ecologically unequal
trade between national economies or world regions.[2]

Dr. Weisz has just summarized how to explain not only environmental damage but extreme
social inequalities, facilitated by money as an ecological phenomenon.

There is a common argument that
neither the world system nor the ecological crisis we are experiencing is “capitalist,”
because the Soviet and Chinese economies were/are “communist.” This is actually
a deceptive argument, because both these economies, apart from their own
rhetoric, employed the same means for development as capitalist economies, and
were in fact both deeply dependent upon trade relations with named-capitalist
economies. Deng Xiaoping of China is one of the founding fathers of neoliberal capitalism.[3] The world systems
perspective looks at the world economy as a whole. And as Jason Moore,
Professor of Sociology at Binghamton University points out,

It is difficult for me to read the
Soviet project as a fundamental rupture. The great industrialization drive of
the 1930s relied massively on the importation of fixed capital, which by 1931
constituted 90 percent of Soviet imports. The Soviets were so desperate to
obtain hard currency that “the state was prepared to export anything and
everything, from gold, oil and furs to the pictures in the Hermitage Museum”.
If the Soviet project resembles other modes of production, it is surely the
tributary, not socialist, mode of production, through which the state directly
extracts the surplus. Nor did the Soviets turn inwards after 1945. Soviet trade
with OECD countries (in constant dollars) increased 8.9 percent annually
between 1950 and 1970, rising to 17.9 percent a year in the following decade a trend accompanied by sharply deteriorating
terms of trade and rising debt across the Soviet-led zone.[4]

One of the main errors of Marxism
generally, in its criticism of capitalism, was its failure to account for
industrial machinery itself as a flow-node that concealed its background
realities, what we have repeatedly referred to here as the out of sight and out of mind problem. More importantly still, Marxism
failed to account for general-purpose money as an ecological phenomenon that disembeds, or dissolves ecosystems and
communities, because it is a sign without a referent to tell it (pun intended), "The buck stops here.." So when we describe the world system as capitalist, we are saying
that these anti-capitalist projects failed because of the illusions they shared
with capitalism itself. They continued to believe that they could cleanly
separate culture from nature. One can very easily argue that today’s China is a
capitalist powerhouse, regardless of what they call themselves. It is an
authoritarian (capitalist) market economy very much like Pinochet’s Chile.[5]

Centers and Margins

I
live in a town of around 24,000 souls, the commercial center for a farming
county, which also has a hospital and three colleges. There were once a lot of
union-wage factory jobs nearby in Toledo and Detroit that supplemented farm
income, and this town then bustled with activity. Factories, however, were
shifted into regions around the world where accumulation could be increased
through steeper under-compensation,
that is, cheaper labor; and this town has many abandoned buildings and closed
shopfronts. The farms have mostly been consolidated into giant monocrop
operations leased by transnational corporations, and the farmers themselves
raise these cash crops by strict rules laid down by those corporations.

If I go to a real estate site on the
web and ask for houses that are priced above $300,000 (very high for this
town), all but one the listings show up on a map in the southeastern quadrant
of town, with on midway along the east, and close to the Country Club. If you
drive through our town from east to west along the main east-west thoroughfare,
the houses and neighborhoods become shabbier the further west you travel, and this
end of town is also where most of the factories and warehouses, as well as
toxic superfund sites are. Money as an entitlement helped to create this map,
which we might call a center-margin map. The center is where the good stuff
flows into, and the margins are where
the bad stuff flows out-to. Those
with more money-entitlements live in a kind of center in the west, and those
with far fewer money-entitlements live in the east. Those in the west tend to work
for those in the east. The east gets clean and pretty, and the west gets dirty
and ugly. If you map where you live, you will find something similar; and if
you live in a big city, you probably have a third region that is a throwaway
region, with “surplus people,” that is, people the economy doesn’t want or need
anymore—areas of extremely high unemployment, environmental toxicity, and
crime. This latter is the margin of the margin, or the falloff region. In the triad
between Miami, Santo Domingo, and Port-au-Prince, the U.S. is the center, the
Dominican Republic is the margin, and Haiti is the fall-off zone. Within Miami itself,
these three zones also exist.

Centers exist parasitically on
margins, and as margins are debilitated by their parasites, more people become
fall-off zones, the center contracts, and those near the center become the new
margins, or parasite-hosts.

Center-margin can be mapped at
differing scales. Mississippi is an extremely poor state compared to
Connecticut, but inside each there are center-margins by region, by county, by
city. Center-margin is not a place, even though we can map it; it is a
relationship. Seen metabolically, as form of metabolism, as “the processes by
which a living organism uses food to obtain energy and build tissue and
disposes of waste material,” the center-margin relationship is the result of
the good stuff flowing one way and the bad stuff flowing the other way with the
center as the exchange node. The benefits remain at the center and the waste
goes to the margin. The mapping of flows is what Helga
Weisz calls “material flow analysis.” What gets imported? What gets exported?

Import Export

Saudi
Arabia once supplied the rest of the region with wheat. Yes, wheat. Most people
don’t think of Saudi Arabia as a wheat producer, because it is largely desert.
But beneath that desert is a massive underground network of aquifers, or
underground lakes. While Saudi Arabia has between 5 and 8 billion cubic meters
of surface water, it has almost 2.3 trillion cubic meters underground.[6] These supplied the water
for wheat production. By 2009, Saudi Arabia began importing more wheat than it
grew for itself; and by 2016, it was importing around 99 percent. The saying
went, they were “selling hydrocarbons to buy carbohydrates.” This was a huge
opportunity for Ag giants like Cargill in the U.S., which could sell U.S.
taxpayer-subsidized wheat in ever greater volumes to the Saudis.[7] The largest oil field in
the world is Ghawar, in Saudi Arabia, and it produces around 65 percent of all
Saudi oil. Ghawar production began to fall in the 1990s, and in 2006 it began
falling precipitously. Pool oil wells with “sweet crude”[8] like Ghawar begin
production under their own pressure; but over time, as the contents are pumped
out, the pressure falls. The Saudi solution to that problem is water injection.[9] They inject large amounts
of water, pulled from aquifers, into the margins of the fields in order to
bring the pump pressure back up. That water is then irreversibly polluted and
lost to other human uses; and it has depleted Saudi aquifers, contributing to
the loss of wheat production.

The largest and richest remaining
hereditary monarchy in the world, Saudi Arabia routinely employs violent
population control measures to its own people, including public beheadings, to
ensure its own stability as an international energy hub. Moreover, it regularly
engages in open bribery, and initiates as well as intervenes in conflicts
throughout the region to secure that stability.[10]

As this is written the United States
imports $53 billion a year in oil from Saudi Arabia, and in return exports $115
billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia, with whom the U.S. is formally and informally
allied in multiple military and diplomatic conflicts. A starker example of the regional
import of order (negentropy) and the export of disorder (pollution, water
depletion, authoritarian corruption, and war) would be hard to find.

The Trees

In
February 1996, when Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina was the epicenter of the civil
wars resulting from Balkan politico-economic disintegration, the flows of fuels
into the city were disrupted by ambushes and snipers along all the routes into
the city. The temperatures dropped, the snow accumulated, and within days,
people began cutting down the trees in the parks to obtain firewood.[11]

In the 1990s and 2000s, I spent a
good deal of time in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the same
island, Hispaniola. Haiti had been serially raped since the colonial period,
including massive deforestation to harvest precious hardwood and clear land for
sugar, coffee, and sisal. The Dominican Republic suffered some of those
extractive depredations, but it became a client state of the United States and
a tourist destination, while Haiti was exploited and left along the figurative
roadside. One of the policies of the Dominican government was to subsidize
bottled gas for its citizens to prevent them cutting the forests that attracted
tourists. Haiti had no such policy, especially since it was subjected to a
series of political coups that disrupted any political continuity. If you look
at a satellite photograph of the Haitian-Dominican border, you can actually see
the border in the contrast between the forested Dominican Republic and
deforested Haiti. In the absence of any fuel supplies or subsidies, Haitians
largely rely on charcoal to cook; and cook they must, because their staple
grain is rice. Charcoal is produced by cutting woody material, even brush, and
subjecting it to a flameless burn underground. The demand for charcoal, and the
small amount of money available to charcoal producers—extremely poor,
low-status, hardworking people called chabonye—has
created a condition wherein the brush and trees are being cut at earlier and
earlier stages, accelerating the desertification, or transformation to desert,
of Haiti. The relative affluence of Dominicans compared to Haitians has also
created a situation in which Dominican sugar and tobacco growers employ Haitian
laborers at rock-bottom wages and in slave-like conditions; and Dominicans have
been socialized to dislike and disrespect Haitians almost as a lower life form.
Ramification.

Higher rates of deforestation often
correspond to lower “levels of development.” This has led many people to assume
that the more industrialized and “advanced” nations have superior environmental
practices. And it is true that the most stringent and well-enforced
environmental protection laws are in the “developed” nations. But we can see that this is a confusion of correlation with causation.
Just because two things exist together does not mean that one is the cause of
the other.

In 86 BCE, Rome had a million
inhabitants.By the fourth century CE,
it had a million and a half. Wood was used for buildings, heating, cooking,
baths, cement, plaster, glass, cart-making, and ship-building. Wood was
depleted locally, then the harvesting activities spread, first to 100
kilometers, then 500, and the rivers were then put to use to float timbers from
afar. Harvests spread to Sicily, to the Appenines in the north, to Macedonia,
to Asia Minor, to Egypt, to Gaul, to the Black Sea, and the Iberian Peninsula.
Many of these areas remain deforested to this day. Rome was the center, and the exploitable, extractable
margins radiated outward.[12]

A quarter of Brazil’s Amazonian
forests have been lost. In 1970, that number was one percent. Amazonia is now
very close to a “point of no return” for ecosystem collapse. The acceleration
of deforestation in Brazil’s Amazonia has been caused in large part by timber
for export, beef for export, soy beans for export, and sugar for ethanol to
offset petroleum shortages.[13] China buys Brazilian
timber to make products, using its own cheap labor, to sell in the United
States, in order to accumulate U.S. dollars. Brazil exports more beef on
international markets than any country in the world.[14] McDonald’s is one of the
main beneficiaries of Brazilian soy, which is as Cargill (a U.S. agri-giant) feed
for the raise-fast-to-kill chickens used in its chicken nuggets.[15]

This is the reason we need world system analysis and the tracking
of flows and nodes. When a tree falls in the forest, it is heard around the
world. Deforestation is nearly always a product of environmental load
displacement; and that means the benefit goes one place and the cost goes
another. This is never an equal exchange. The average Brazilian earns about a
quarter of what an average American does. More than twenty-one percent of
Brazilians live on less than two dollars a day.[16]

War on Subsistence

"Development,” which is difference
over space (Brazil, 2017; the United States, 2017), is spoken of as a difference
over time, or “in stages.” This misrepresentation serves to fix our gaze on one point at a time as a way of
making us ignore a larger reality of relationships.

The
current fashion . . . is to dissolve any distinction between the modern and the
premodern as a modern fabrication . . . The rather remarkable implication is
that, in the course of the emergence of urban-industrial civilization, no
significant changes have been taking place in terms of social relations,
knowledge construction, or human-environmental relations. The closely knit
kinship group, locally contextualized ecological knowledge, attachment to
place, reciprocity, animism: all of them are suddenly dismissed as myth. With
the displacement of the old narrative, represented most forcefully by Karl
Polanyi, emerges the new but implicit message that we have always been
capitalists.[17]

The Polanyi who blew up this
“implicit message” wrote a book called The
Great Transformation, the publication of which was eclipsed by the end of
World War II. The narrative of economics, and even the narrative of pop
culture, is that everyone has always been essentially the same; and that the
emergence of a market-dominated society was the result of removing the dead
weight of authority and superstition from the past. In fact, nothing could be
further from the truth, as Polanyi showed with his history of the violent and
intentional process over decades to impost the so-called “self-regulating
market” on the whole of society.

We have been covering two key
Polanyian concepts in this book so far: the multiple forms of exchange
(reciprocity, redistribution, householding), and the phenomenon of disembedding,
in Polanyi’s case of people being disembedded from non-market relationships
like family, home town, etc., and re-embedded in strictly market relationships.
Polanyi was a Hungarian intellectual living in Germany, before Hitler’s rise in
1933 convinced him to become a scholar in residence at Bennington College in
Vermont. He later taught at Columbia University.

In The
Great Transformation, he described the two-pronged process of enclosure and
regulation that were employed by modern states to remove people from non-market
driven communities and networks, especially those that gave people a degree of
independence from the need for money to survive. People did not voluntarily
leave their subsistence farms in the countryside to live in the city and work
for wages in a factory. In fact, they fought that at every turn. They had to be
legally and forcibly removed from the means of subsistence, especially land, in
order to force them into emerging labor markets.[18]

Whereas the "Inclosure Laws" of Great
Britain were originally a system of combining many small farms under the
control of many families into large holdings by one person (and evicting the
rest) in order to support the wool export trade, the term “enclosure” is now
used as a catch-all for any legal-policy action that transfers small holdings
of public commons into private hands with the result of forcing former
inhabitants into dependency on wage labor. Privatization is a form of
enclosure. Intellectual property laws are forms of enclosure. Enclosure might
be defined for our purposes as any law that intentionally separates people from
their means of subsistence to produce greater dependency money through approved
market relations. All privatization is enclosure.

Ecological feminists Maria Mies and
Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen called modern development “the war on subsistence.”

In
the North and, since 1945, increasingly in the rest of the world, everything
that is connected with the immediate creation and maintenance of life, and also
everything that is not arranged through the production and consumption of
commodities, has been devalued. This includes all activities whose object is self-provisioning,
whether in the house, the garden the workshop, on the land or in the stable.
What doesn’t cost or doesn’t produce money is worthless. This devaluation of
self-provisioning work cannot be understood, if measured only quantitatively.
It indicates at the same time the degradation and contempt of the person who
does this work . . . This barrier of disgust[19], which today surrounds
all unpaid, essential-for-life subsistence activities, has no relation to the
content of this work. Such activities are suddenly recognized as decent
professions, not only for women but also for men, if they are carried out by
industrialized, waged labour . . . high esteem for wage labour obviously rest
on the high evaluation of money and on its myth. Not the image of money as a
simple medium of exchange or measure of value, but of the money that creates
ever more money which then becomes the basis of life, security for life and the
hope of progress, emancipation, culture, and the ‘good life’ . . . He/she who does not work for wages cannot
live.[20]

Ivan Illich likewise identified “progress”
or “development” as a systematic war on subsistence. Illich had a unique way of
referring to subsistence activities. He called them “vernacular.” With regard
to language, the term vernacular
means the way that ordinary people speak which may not conform to more formal
grammatical rules. Illich described vernacular community and vernacular
practices as those that were rooted in householding
forms of economy, in friendships, and in the most common forms of social
reciprocity.

What is interesting about Illich is that
he again describes the loss of the vernacular to a process of “radical
monopolization,” or enclosure—cultural,
political, economic, through increasing institutionalization, as the hallmark
of modernity; but he again traces its gestation and development back into his
own church. Christianity in power, the church as an institution, practiced a
form of enclosure of the church as a
people of God. Moreover, he directly associates the imposition of “grammatical”
language with the emergence of the imperial nation-state which has overseen a
500 year “war on subsistence.”

As the Western Roman Church came to power,
and in confronting Western Europe’s unstable feudal political ecology within which
to exercise that power, sin came to be treated as a matter of law. It was
“criminalized,” in Illich’s words, which gave the Church the aspect of what
would eventually come to be that of the modern nation-state. It attempted, as
we noted in the first chapter, “to insure, to guarantee, to regulate Revelation,”
to enforce by law the radical freedom that was gifted to humanity by the
Incarnation. In other words, it “institutionalized” grace, and thereby
perverted it.[21]

By 1492, when Isabella of Castile had married
Ferdinand II of Aragon and consolidated their rule over present-day Spain in a
series of bloody wars and pogroms, Isabella consented to financing an
ill-conceived expedition by Cristobal Colon (Christopher Columbus) to open a
westward seaway to South Asia. Colon, who had wildly overestimated the distance
to the horizon used this miscalculation to determine he would reach India in
around 2,400 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. In the same year, she was
approached by a scholar named Elio Antonio de Nebrija who had composed a book
of Spanish grammar, who suggested to her that the standardization of language
within her nation-state and throughout her future empire was as essential as
arms. He told her that “language is the consort of empire.” Illich tells these
parallel stories, in spite of the fact that Isabella did not comprehend what
Nebrija was saying about language, just as Colon never realized that
Hispaniola, the island he first landed upon that eventually became Haiti and
the Dominican Republic, was not in India. Illich simply uses this story to show
two aspects of the modern empires, which would center on nation-states, which
indeed did come to work in tandem.

As Christendom gave way to secular
modernity, the empires of Europe did indeed require both arms and language to
establish their power. Nebrija understood better than Isabella that the “loose
and unruly” vernacular speech of the heterogeneous peasantry made them more
difficult to rule and bend to the purposes of the state. The authoritarian church,
who had called itself the Mother of its members, lost ground to the state, and
the state adopted churchy terms to supplant the church. This was where the term
“mother tongue” originated, the nation-state as the new Mother, and its
language standardized to bleed off the subversive potential of vernacular
tongues which contained vernacular values and vernacular relations. In support of the centralization of power, language
itself was enclosed, and the first grammar
books as well as the first schools were designed to stamp out vernacular
languages and with them vernacular allegiances.[22]

These changes corresponded in time
and place to a changing political economy. Subsistence, and what Mies calls
“the subsistence perspective,” came to be an obstacle to expansion and
commodification as well as a threat to the imperatives of nation-states that
increasingly depended upon and became subordinate to those who had most
successfully accumulated money. A community that produces all it needs for
food, fuel, clothing, and shelter is not populated by people who willingly work
in factories or take up arms for the state. Their environments provide them
with most of what they need, abundantly in many cases.

Empires are comprised of consuming
centers and exploitable margins, margins that must expand as resources are exhausted.
The need for more arms, more ships, etc., leads to the intensification of
exploitation, the competitively driven search for greater production and
velocity, and thereby for more of that essential accelerating sign: money. The
peasants must be removed from the land, the land converted to wealth
accumulation, and the subsistence economies broken up to provide labor to the
mills. This war on subsistence was vastly
accelerated around the world after World War II during something given the Orwellian name "the Green Revolution."

Dependency

We’ve
circled around this; now let’s lay it out. We are nearer to subsistence—understood
in a good way—as production and consumption are closer together in space. This
is also and ultimately the only way we can dramatically reduce our utter
dependency on general-purpose money. Right now, my dependency and yours is
based on the threefold reality that (1) all our goods and all our built
environment are organized around the need for materials, land, labor, and
energy that are often thousands of miles distant, (2) these goods and this
built environment, including the technology, cannot extract these materials,
land, labor, and energy from their original contexts without the solvent of
general-purpose money, and (3) we ourselves, given the specialization of our
built environment and our work, no longer have the capacity to survive without
money. The simplest thought exercise here is to try an imagine surviving
through today without it, through the week, through the month. What was done to
those English peasants between the twelfth and twentieth centuries, which
eventually wiped them out as a class that practiced subsistence, has been done
to all of us. We have been enclosed.
Once you are in the position where you must have those dollars to live, you
have become dependent upon those who have dollars to spare. Money, which serves
them as an entitlement, now entitles them to your time and space and sweat.
This immediacy of need, the very fact that we can no longer survive without
serving those with more money than we have, forces us into the manifold moral
compromises that thoughtful people struggle with every day. I hate automobiles.
They are destructive, dirty, dangerous, and expensive. As an American, living
in the built environment that I do, I cannot at this point in time afford not
to have an automobile. This dependency is what traps us in the many forms of
complicity that whisper to me every day, “You are a hypocrite.”

These forms of dependency are
designed as such, not some social evolutionary accident. This precise system is
maintained and protected by those in power, because they are fully aware that
this is the architecture of their power.

Dependency is nested, dependencies
within dependencies within dependencies. Just as an unhappy wife might be trapped
in marriage to an unpleasant husband by her need for protection from other men
or her inability to earn enough to survive, the unhappy worker in the miserable
factory or hundred degree field is trapped by dependency, the mid-level manager
is trapped into being a prick to his subordinates—even when he hates it—by
dependency, the post-colonial nation is trapped by the need to get dollars to
pay international debts by dependency, and so on.

This is not saying each person is
independent of every other person. We know this is not true. Interdependency is
built in to human nature. But we are not speaking of the covenantal
relationships, the voluntary cooperation, the necessary divisions of labor
arrived at under no duress. Understand that the dominant class is dependent as
well. We pointed out earlier that the rich exist parasitically on the poor, and
the center nations exist parasitically on the marginal nations. A parasite depends on its host. The key thing to
look for is not interdependency, but
mutual dependency on an axis of domination
and subordination.

[19] Disgust is culturally constructed
and serves to emotionally police social boundaries, those boundaries between
what is considered clean and unclean. When I was an urban high school student
in the sixties, one of the most common insults thrown at people who appeared
unsophisticated was to be called “farmer.”